Thaumaturgy
by Iloveplotbunnies
Summary: AU. "If I can't, you need to be the savior. You need to lead them to salvation. He can't win."


**Title: **Thaumaturgy

**Disclaimer: **I have never owned _The Mentalist_; and I unfortunately never will.

**Rating: **T for now.

**Summary: **AU. "If I can't, you need to be the savior. You need to lead them to salvation. He can't win."

Firstly, this fic is an extremely belated birthday present for Frogster. I hate being nearly a month late with gifts, but I know she'll forgive me once she sees what I have planned. ;)

Secondly, this fic is an AU that heavily involves magic and elements of fantasy; it involves the use of both major and minor characters that have starred in the show through the season five finale. I'll try to update regularly, but currently, no promises can be made.

Lastly, this fic is an attempt to get a 25-in-1 achievement for hurt/comfort bingo. I've taken all twenty-five of my bingo prompts and have incorporated them into this story, so it'll definitely be an interesting (yet bumpy) ride. I only hope you all will enjoy reading this!

_Thaumaturgy is the performing of miracles or magic._

* * *

**Prologue**

Fleeing.

That's all they ever did.

That's all she had ever done, since the eighteenth year of her life and the blood moon had hung high in the night sky. Teresa Lisbon felt the surrounding darkness prickle at her skin, as she ran through the night-enclosed maze in the dead of winter.

Her booted feet hit against the hard ground, untouched by snow, while she twisted her neck to glance over her shoulder; the silhouettes of sinful magic were still pursuing her, close on her trail. Lisbon's rapid breaths were unnoticeable in the dark chill; her lungs burned from the lack of oxygen and she nearly paused to steady her movements as the adrenaline slowly drained from her, but she knew stopping wasn't an option. Instead, she forced her eyes forward again, skillfully avoiding a tree in her path, before she heaved a sigh of relief at the shimmering lights in the distance.

_Just a little further now_, she told herself.

Exerting the last of her adrenaline and energy to slip past the magical protection barrier, she threw herself behind a cluster of jagged rocks and kept her attention on the scene, magically lit, behind the barrier. The eerie silhouettes hovered at the barrier, probing the invisible wall with their long and ghastly tentacles of dark magic until they faded from sight. She, however, did not move.

In silence, she watched the CBI's—Copper Blade Infantry—famed Recovery Unit run past the barrier, triumphant smiles on their shadowed faces as one of them forced a bloody Brenda Shettrick onto her bare knees. Brenda's patched and tattered white dress shirt, scoured from one of their various trashcan raids, did nothing to hide the stains of dirt or blood from where one of the infantry members had tackled her to the ground to force a band of pure ivory around her elongated neck. Brenda's fingers were also swollen and tinged purple, Lisbon noticed, after the Recovery Unit's Senior Officer Ray Haffner had forced the redhead down on all fours; the right profile of Brenda's bruised and pale face, illuminated by the barrier's magic, remained feet from where Lisbon was catching her breath.

Lisbon quickly scanned Haffner's proper statue for any sign of mercy, but as usual, she found none in his harsh expression; with his slicked-black dusty blonde hair dashed with pepper and his shoulders rolled back, her eyes immediately caught sight of his black tie apparel and she grimaced in distaste. How could anyone, let alone the Senior Officer in charge, traipse the forest in Italian leather shoes?

Brenda's sharp intake of breath averted Lisbon's attention away from Haffner, who had grabbed a fistful of Brenda's unruly red hair and had forced her neck to bend upward, until her eyes found his.

"Witch, speak," Haffner demanded of Brenda, abrasively. Brenda's darkened expression, Lisbon watched, quickly became one of amusement. "The Master has demanded the capture of anyone, human or beast, in league with Teresa Lisbon…"

"Your Master," Brenda corrected, spitting at Haffner's pristine feet, "can go straight to the tenth circle of Hell; and while we're at it, I vote for you to join him, you worthless mortal." Lisbon watched Haffner strike Brenda across the face, his fingers coming away with her blood. Brenda snorted in response. "Don't like your own blood, human? It's not my fault your mother bedded her brother."

For the most part, it was common knowledge amongst those hidden within the Augury Forest that Haffner's hatred of magic stemmed from his lack of possession. His mother, Briana Chelsea Haffner, had once been foolish with her own powers and had her magic stripped from her due to the intimate relations that she had with Christoffer Haffner, her own brother.

Haffner's stoic expression quickly converted into something foreign, his teeth bared. "I would quickly learn the artful skill of silence, Shettrick."

"Or what, _Officer _Haffner?" Brenda shot back, sardonically. Lisbon briefly closed her eyes and her fingers brushed against the rusted crucifix around her neck, silently praying that the woman would heed Haffner's veiled warning to stay quiet. While Brenda would eventually find herself back in the Kingdom of Carmine to face a series of "trials" for her perceived crimes against The Master and ultimately face death, Lisbon knew Brenda's comments to Haffner would hasten her death.

Although Haffner's Master disproved of killing any magical being prior to his practice of draining their powers for his own magical enhancement, the higher Officers in the Recovery Unit were known for their manipulations of a deceased body and the surrounding crime scenes.

"You'll huff and you'll puff, until your little baby lungs give out, hm?" Brenda continued, slightly tilting her head to the side in Haffner's hold. Lisbon eyed Haffner's twitching fingers as her hand went for her own gun, tucked away in the back of her tattered blue jeans, but the hallowed look in Brenda's eyes stopped her from putting a bullet through Haffner's head and exposing them all to Haffner's four man team.

She knew she could make the difficult shot to save Brenda's life, but on the other hand, she knew the older witch couldn't take much more of their so-called nomad lifestyle. Brenda had said that she had always dreamt of having the high society life, the trendy clothing, the exquisite food, and the adoration from others, but as she was a "beast", her dreams of being anything other than a wanted criminal went up in smoke.

In turn, it seemed her only way out of being a "beast", was by taunting Haffner until he put her out of her misery.

"I'll kill you," Haffner replied, evenly. Brenda's eyes rolled in response, before his elongated fingers slid across the ivory band around her neck. "Or rather, I'll just let your magic do it for me." A small and twisted smirk tugged at his lips. "The Master won't have any use for a less than satisfying wench, anyway."

Brenda pursed her lips, before she held her chin up highly and forced her nose away from him in disgust. Lisbon heard Haffner snort. "Your million-thread count dress shirts and fake leather shoes don't make you any better than the rest of us." She moved her lips into a smirk. "It just means you eat out of His hand with clothing on, which makes you marginally better than Jane. Woof, woof, you incestuous…"

A painful lump formed in Lisbon's throat at Haffner's thunderous expression. If Brenda hadn't signed her own death warrant before, she had most certainly signed it now with the comparison between Patrick Jane and Ray Haffner. Lisbon could only watch in reluctant acceptance of Brenda's final fate, as Haffner stepped aside and Officer Timothy Carter took his place, a cold smirk plastered across his shadowed face.

Timothy Carter, Lisbon quickly surmised, hadn't changed since their last encounter nearly three months ago. The officer still wore the same tight red shirt, embroidered with the CBI's darkened emblem above his heart, a smiley face with two knifes through the center, and a pair of pristine jeans combined with a black carrier bag, which contained all of his human weapons and poisons. Carter's forehead glistened with sweat, his vibrant red hair pressed flat against his head and Lisbon was thankful that the barrier only permitted the senses of vision and hearing as she imagined Carter smelled of something awful, from the way his underarms stained his shirt with sweat.

"Too bad the boss wants you dead, Shettrick," Carter said, brushing his fingers across Brenda's jaw. "Otherwise, I might have kept you handcuffed to my bed. I need more work on my copulation spells, as they are rusty."

Unlike herself, Carter had found a good medium between utilizing human weapons and dark magic to do his Master's bidding in the capture of magical creatures. Lisbon knew Carter took his role as Officer of Punishments, sacrilegiously, as she had lost many good friends and mentors to Carter's warped methods.

"Yeah?" Brenda asked, smirking. "So is your manhood."

Carter lost his smirk. "You're going to pay for that, harlot." Carter removed his fingers from Brenda's jaw, before he glanced down at her. "I always thought you needed a few more lessons from your husband before you could ever become truly useful too." Lisbon waited for Carter to sentence Brenda to her fate, as per his usual pattern, but silence befell him as two of his fingers made a circular motion and the irises of his eyes took on a black hue.

In a single movement, Haffner forced Brenda's body to the ground with his foot as her body began to convulse wildly and her pale flesh sizzled, heat wafting from her pores. The ivory collar, which remained tight around Brenda's neck, pulsed with a red radiance so intense and blinding that Lisbon had to shield her own eyes to protect them.

"Another one dead," after a moment or so of an eerie silence, she heard Haffner speak and she uncovered her eyes to find him candidly chatting with Carter before the barrier. "It's a shame, really. I had such high hopes that she would tell us where Teresa Lisbon and her beasts were hiding," Haffner's shoulders moved slightly, before he crossed his arms against his chest. "Tell me something, Carter."

"Of course, sir," Carter replied, lively. His blue eyes—no longer hued black—were what Lisbon could only describe as bright at what he had just done to Brenda Shettrick and it made her queasy.

"The resistance band," Haffner continued, staring at something beyond Carter's head. "I've only ever seen it pulse three colors before. When Tommy Volker had his accident," an event that hadn't been an accident at all, but instead a way for Haffner to take control of the Recovery Unit which had been in the hands of Volker up until almost six months ago, "the collar pulsed black; something we simply associated with the core of his magic."

Lisbon clearly remembered Volker, as The Master had chosen him to lead the hunt for her nearly twenty-one years ago and she honestly couldn't say that his death hadn't made her relieved. Haffner was horrible, but Volker had been worse; Volker had tortured individuals before her eyes and the one time he had captured her, he had used her body for his various experiments to "learn more about the repression of magic".

Carter nodded in agreement. "He was worthy; therefore, the band pulsed black. His wholesome magic was slowly eating away at him, burning his organs from the inside out." His words made her roll her eyes in response. Volker hadn't been worthy or wholesome, his core had been full of dark magic; something that had eventually eaten away at his insides, due to the band _he _had created from his experiments on her.

(She would never admit it aloud, but she personally thought the method of his execution had served him right. He had perfected that band on hundreds of witches, wizards and other various magical creatures, only to have the device used on him, an extremely ironic and pathetic ending to his life.)

"Understandable," Haffner answered, before he continued with his question. "When we killed Mancini, the band pulsed white. He was, essentially, a waste of his powers." Lisbon pursed her lips at the inaccurate description of one of her first friends, who had died many years ago. Gabe Mancini—an enigmatic magi—had been one of her oldest childhood friends, who had kept his abilities quiet until they had escaped the Kingdom of Carmine together. He had introduced her to a world full of mystery and danger, before his life had ended at the age of twenty-six due to Volker's Resistance Band. His death was an event she revisited often; lying in her makeshift mattress, late at night, she imagined how their lives would have been different if she had just turned herself in to Volker and The Master, instead of fleeing like Gabe had requested her to do.

_Someone has to stop him, Teresa_, Gabe had said, moments before Volker had returned with two ivory bands. _If I can't, you need to be their savior. You need to lead them to salvation. He can't win. _

_I don't want to be the savior, _she had told him in tears. _I just want you by my side_.

She had never loved him as anything other than a close friend, but she almost wished that she could have loved him as more. He had been her strength up until his death, and his death had made her pledge never to use magic again. Magic, she believed, good or bad wasn't worth the cost of another life.

Carter's lips upturned into a grin. "Mancini's magic rejected his body; something Volker bolstered on about for weeks, as I'm sure you remember well." Haffner nodded, sneering. "The band knows the poison of a bad core, which is why the band never affects the same beast twice. Other various magical creatures cause the band to pulse purple, and depending on what type of monstrosity they are, the band causes different end results." His lips curled into a smirk. "Vampires, for instance, apparently go into bloodlust; as the blackened blood curdles within their very veins."

"I can't wait to try that out," Haffner responded to Carter's remark and Lisbon shivered. "However, I'd like to know why Shettrick's magic turned the band red."

Lisbon paused in her internal thoughts to crane her neck; it obviously wouldn't help her to hear Carter's answer any better, but it forced her attention elsewhere. The question of the band's pulsing red color weighed heavily on her mind still. She had bared witness to the band's pulsing colors of white, black and purple before, but she had never once seen the ivory band pulse red.

Carter's sudden grin caused her skin to crawl and her mouth to go dry.

_TBC..._


End file.
